George couldn’t remember ever closing his front door with a greater sense of relief. Before he could even take off his hat, the door to the living room opened and Anne was there, taking the three short steps into his arms. ‘It’s great to be home,’ he sighed, drinking in the musky smell of her hair, conscious too that he’d not washed since the previous morning.
‘You work too hard,’ she scolded gently. ‘You’ll do nobody any favours if you work yourself into the ground. Come on through, there’s a fire on and it won’t take me five minutes to warm up the casserole.’ She moved back from his embrace and looked critically at him. ‘You look worn out. It’s a hot bath and bed for you as soon as you’ve finished your tea.’
‘I’d rather have the bath first, if the water’s hot.’
‘And so you shall. I’ve had the immersion on. I was going to have a bath myself, but you’d better take the water. You get yourself undressed and I’ll run the bath.’ She shooed him upstairs ahead of her.
Half an hour later, he was in his dressing gown at the kitchen table, wolfing down a generous helping of beef and carrot stew accompanied by a plate of bread and butter. ‘Sorry there’s no spuds,’ Anne apologized. ‘I thought bread and butter would be quicker and I knew you’d need something as soon as you got in. You never eat properly when you’re working.’
‘Mmm,’ he grunted through a mouthful of food.
‘Have you found her, then, your missing girl? Is that why you’re home?’
The food in his mouth seemed to congeal into an indigestible lump. George forced it down his gullet. It felt like swallowing a hairball the size of a golf ball. ‘No,’ he said, staring down at his plate. ‘And I don’t think she’ll be alive when we do.’
Anne’s face paled. ‘But that’s awful, George. How can you be sure?’
He shook his head and sighed. ‘I can’t be sure. But we know she didn’t go off of her own free will. Don’t ask me how, but we know. She’s not from the kind of family where she’d be kidnapped for a ransom. And people who steal children generally don’t keep them alive for long. So my guess is she’s already dead. And if she’s not, she will be before we can find her, because we’ve got absolutely nothing to go on. The villagers act like we’re the enemy instead of on their side, and the landscape is so difficult to search properly it feels like even that’s conspiring against us.’ He pushed his plate away and reached for Anne’s cigarettes.
‘That’s terrible,’ she said. ‘How can her mother begin to cope with it?’
‘She’s a strong woman, Ruth Hawkin. I suppose if you grow up in a place where life is as hard as it is in Scardale, you learn to bend rather than break. But I don’t know how she’s holding together. She lost her first husband in a farming accident seven years ago, and now this. The new husband’s not a lot of use either. One of those selfish beggars who see everything in terms of how it’s going to affect them.’
‘What? You mean a man?’ Anne teased.
‘Very funny. I’m not like that. I don’t expect my tea on the table when I walk through the door, you know. You don’t have to wait on me.’
‘You’d soon get fed up if it wasn’t.’
George conceded with a shrug and a smile. ‘You’re probably right. Us men get used to you women taking care of us. But if our child ever went missing, I don’t think I’d be demanding my tea before my wife went out looking for her.’
‘He did that?’
‘According to one witness.’ He shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this.’
‘Who am I going to tell? The only people I know here are other coppers’ wives. And they’ve not exactly taken me to their bosom. The ones my age are all lower ranks’ wives so they don’t trust me, especially since I’m a qualified teacher and none of them have ever done anything more challenging than working in a shop or an office. And the officers’ wives are all older than me and treat me like I’m a silly girl. So you can be sure I’m not going to be gossiping about your case, George,’ Anne said with an edge of acerbity.
‘I’m sorry. I know it’s not been easy for you to make new friends here.’ He reached out to grip her hand in his.
‘I don’t know how I’d go on if I lost a child.’ Almost unconsciously, her free hand slipped to her stomach.
George’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’ he asked sharply.
Anne’s fair skin flushed scarlet. ‘I don’t know, George. It’s just that…well, my monthly visitor’s overdue. A week overdue. So…I’m sorry, love, I didn’t mean to say anything till I was sure, what with it being a missing child case you’re on. But yes, I think I might be expecting.’
A slow smile spread across George’s face as her words sank in. ‘Really? I’m going to be a dad?’
‘It could be a false alarm. But I’ve never been late before.’ She looked almost apprehensive.
George jumped to his feet and swung her out of her chair, spinning her around in a whirl of joy. ‘It’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.’ They staggered to a halt and he kissed her hard and passionately. ‘I love you, Mrs Bennett.’
‘And I love you too, Mr Bennett.’
He pulled her close, burying his face in her hair. A child. His child. All he had to do now was figure out how to manage what had been beyond every parent since Adam and Eve: how to keep it safe.
Up to that point, Alison Carter had been an important case to Detective Inspector George Bennett. Now it had symbolic importance. Now it was a crusade.
In Scardale, the mood was as brooding as the limestone crags surrounding the dale. Charlie Lomas’s experience at the hands of the police had flashed round the village as fast as the news of Alison’s disappearance. While the women checked anxiously and regularly that their children were all in bed asleep, the men had congregated in the kitchen of Bankside Cottage, where Ruth and her daughter had lived until her marriage to Hawkin.
Terry Lomas, Charlie’s father, chewed the stem of his pipe and grumbled about the police. ‘They’ve got no right to treat our Charlie like a criminal,’ he said.
Charlie’s older brother John scowled. ‘They’ve got no idea what’s happened to our Alison. They’re just making an example of Charlie so it looks like they’re doing something.’
‘They’re not going to let it go at that, though, are they?’ Charlie’s uncle Robert said. ‘They’ll go through us one by one if they get no change out of Charlie. That Bennett bloke, he’s got a bee in his bonnet about Alison, you can tell.’
‘But that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’ Ray Carter chipped in. ‘It means he’s going to do a proper job. He’s not going to settle till he’s got an answer.’
‘That’s fine if it’s the right answer,’ Terry said.
‘Aye,’ Robert said pensively. ‘But how do we make sure he doesn’t get distracted from what he should be doing because he’s too busy persecuting the likes of young Charlie? The lad’s not tough, we all know that. They’ll be putting words in his mouth. For all we know, if they can’t get the right man, they’ll decide to have Charlie anyway and to hell with it.’
‘There’s two roads we can go,’ Jack Lomas said. ‘We can stonewall them. Tell them nothing, except what we need to cover Charlie’s back all ways. They’ll soon realize they’ll have to find another scapegoat then. Or we can bend over backwards to help them. Maybe that way they’ll realize that looking at the people who cared about our Alison isn’t going to find the lass or whoever took her.’
There was a long